Welcome to the world of iPads in live improvisatory performances...
What is the iPad ensemble?
It was actually founded by my predecessor at Central Connecticut State, Dr. Charles Manoche. I think it was 2016, he initiated this ensemble where students perform as a chamber ensemble using iPads.
There's something kind of paradoxical about making music on an iPad with other people who are also on iPads. But I think we've found a way, through improvisation in particular, to make it very social as well.
How do you approach teaching this?
When I started teaching this group, my first thought was, "what is the performance practice of a group like this? What is our working practice going to look like?" At first I tried to figure out what had been done in the past, but ultimately I had to decide on my own performance practice: in terms of what was going to work artistically, what was going to work pedagogically with the students, and what was going to work technologically.
Then everything falls into place from that: how much do we need to rehearse? What's the structure of the rehearsals going to look like? How many performances are we going to give per semester? What are those performances going to look like?
What I ended up doing was thinking of the group as very much like a jazz combo or a jazz big band that's preparing charts. They sometimes are distinct pieces... but a lot of times aren't necessarily.
What apps do you use?
There's an app called Animoog, where there's a piano interface on the tablet screen. You press the piano buttons, and then it'll make those notes.
There's an app called Korg Gadget that allows you to do some interesting things. It has synthesizers, but you can also load in arpeggiators, samplers, and drum machines, and then you press buttons on a virtual interface that looks a little bit like the hardware versions of these instruments. You can trigger sounds that way or you can sequence sounds.
Probably my favorite is an app called Borderlands. You can load in audio clips, or record an audio clip, and then on the screen the audio kind of floats there. And then you create these little solar systems of dots and things, and they're generating grains of sound based on whatever audio the solar system happens to be overlapping with. If you drag the audio under the solar system, it starts to trigger little grains of sound, and then if you move it away, it stops. So what you can do is make many different solar systems, create many different audio clips, and then just kind of mix them all up.
It gets really fun because you can automate the solar systems to move around in little orbits. You can actually hold up the iPad and use the accelerometer inside of it. If the surface is flat, everything will stay where it is, but then if you start tilting it, they'll start falling to the lower side of the screen.
It's a super creative, interesting way of interacting with sound. You end up with these results that you couldn't possibly get otherwise.
That's one of the really cool things about the iPad as an instrument: you're not limited to just one kind of interaction or one kind of interface.
Where do you start with music and sounds?
There's lots of free sample repositories online, so I grabbed a selection of things the students could integrate into performances. Inevitably they end up gathering their own stuff. One student really likes using the Taco Bell bell sound - that's shown up in a number of performances. Sometimes they'll record themselves saying something. Sometimes they'll record me saying something in rehearsal, and it'll show up in performance.
The idea is that it should be a free-flowing creative situation and not a top-down "here's what you need to do. Here's the sounds you can use."
A graphic score is a kind of musical notation where instead of using notes, rests, rhythms, time signatures and key signatures, you use graphic symbols or lines or even verbal instructions to guide the musicians, but not necessarily to dictate exactly what sounds they're going to be using.
Going back to the comparison with jazz, we have a fake book that includes all the charts that we typically use in our performances. Then the students always have a reference point if they want to remember, "what key was this in? What app did I use? How long is this performance typically? What are the guidelines that we decided on as a group? What are the roles?" I try to keep that updated semester by semester so that the students have a reference point.
Students will actually compose their own music. For pieces that are successful that we want to do in the future, I'll ask the students if I can include their piece in our fake book. We've got a bunch of pieces that the group has put together, and a bunch of pieces that individuals in the group have composed, that now we can draw on and perform again sometime in the future.
What types of pieces do you do?
We have one piece we do a lot called Beat Buildup. We have a little intro section, we build up a beat, then we kind of vary the beat like a verse and chorus section, then we go back to the beat, and then we have an outro. It always has the same very simple structure.
We also did a really cool piece that a student composed called Quadrants, where he created a graphic score that was divided into four quadrants for each of the four members of the ensemble. Then we cut the piece of paper into the four quadrants and flipped them over like playing cards. I ask every musician to draw a card right before the performance, they flip it over, and they interpret that score spontaneously, not having known in advance which one they would get. We project the graphic score behind the ensemble, so the audience can guess while they're listening who was assigned which quadrant.
Quadrants by Miguel Davila
We do some live sampling as well. We have a piece called Crowdsource, which continues to evolve. We're currently on Crowdsource 2.5. With this version, at the beginning of the performance we actually ask the audience to come up and make a sound, and we'll record it. One person will whistle, one person will clap, one person will say something, one person will sing, whatever it ends up being. The students take a couple of minutes to prepare something using their headphones, then they improvise a performance using only those samples that were just recorded a moment ago.
What are performances like?
The individual students' iPad screens are projected behind them, so the audience can actually see how they're interacting with the interfaces while they're making the sound. You can actually connect "oh, I think they just played that note because I just saw it flash and then I heard it."
People who have been to the performances say that's a really engaging and important part of the performance for them. I think it's not always the most exciting thing to see people sitting at a tablet. But when you can actually see what they're doing on the screen, it becomes evident that they're clearly not just checking their email... they're swapping between different interfaces, and mixing between two different apps at once, and all kinds of really sophisticated music technology tasks. And you can make that connection between what you're hearing and what you're seeing.
Here's a link to some of the performances if you're interested.
A legitimate instrument
I find the iPad an absolutely legitimate, rich, interesting musical instrument. Some of the interfaces are so imaginative, they're creative, they're cool. When I was first tasked with leading this group, I think I was a little dubious of what all was possible with an iPad. I've been really amazed the deeper that I've gone.
Obviously there's always going to be IT frustrations, premium features with apps, weird issues that come up with the App Store and licenses and boring things like that.
But despite all of that, at its core, there's real musical potential that I've discovered. And the students will discover something and will be like, "Oh, you could be doing this," or, "You could do this," or, "You could preload this," or, "You can sequence this this way." It's really cool to not only discover possibility for yourself, but have your students discovering stuff that you didn't even know was there.
Zeitgeist Moment
I moved up to Connecticut for this job, and I live in the city of Danbury, which is where the American composer Charles Ives lived. Every October they celebrate Charles Ives' birthday. This past fall the iPad Ensemble was invited to perform as part of the festivities. We gave a performance at a local theater, but before we did that we actually went to the house, his birthplace, which is now part of the Danbury Museum.
Members from the iPad Ensemble came along and they were sampling sounds around his house. The ducks in the pond nearby, the wind going through the trees... it was just really an incredible sight to see them sitting on Charles Ives' couch, recording samples. They had a gramophone that I think maybe had belonged to the Ives family or at least was from the same period, and they were playing these really old recordings. I saw the students recording the sounds of these gramophone records with their iPads, and they integrated these samples into a later performance.
It was this amazing moment of being in a place where a musician you admire got their inspiration... but then to be passing that on to another generation, and for them to be finding ways to integrate those sounds and that inspiration into what they're doing and what they find musically interesting. That was a really special experience.
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A huge thank you to Drake Andersen for speaking with me!
